Woman Who Always Loved Picasso

Blackburn Julia

It is unusual for Carcanet to produce an illustrated book, and in thiscase to host so distinguished an illustrator and designer as Jeff Fisher.His drawings animate the vivid voice of Marie-Therese, created withgreat immediacy by Julia Blackburn.

Marie-Therese was seventeen when she met Picasso. He was fortysix.The poems, simple in language – daubed as it were – make senseof Picasso's love for this young woman who was, John Berger says, "the sexually most important affair of his life". They assume the youngwoman's voice, taking up the story at their first meeting. We recognisesome of his great paintings in their occasions and formation. Threeyears after his death she took her own life.

Julia Blackburn has written two novels (both shortlisted for the Orange Prize); a memoir, "The Three of Us" (winner of the J. R. AckerleyAward), and nine works of non-fiction of which the most recent, "Time Song", was published by Cape in 2019.

About the Author

Julia Blackburn was born in London in 1948 to the poet Thomas Blackburn and the painter Rosalie de Meri – she wrote on the topic of her unconventional upbringing in her memoir "The Three of Us". She lives between Suffolk and Northern Italy and has two children with the sculptor Herman Makkink.

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